MoFo MC August: Brick

I disagree. I think Rian Johnson's script was intriguing and clever. The dialogue grabbed by attention right away, and the way it was executed kept my interest for the entire movie. It didn't feel artificial. Johnson took a huge risk with script, and in my opinion, it paid off. Can't we just give credit where credit is due? "Brick" is a tough little movie with a unique sensibility and a well-crafted story. It saddens me to see it being picked apart so meticulously.

In addition, I'd like to briefly point out the beautiful visuals in this film. Although the noir-era dialogue is the main attraction here, I think that the cinematography deserves a nod.

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I was only a mild fan of the film, because I had heard so many good things going into it that it fell short of expectations. I liked the dialogue, but the story wasn't all that appealing to me, because it was just too unbelievable. I liked the movie enough to watch it again, but it just wasn't a great movie to me.

I watched Brick last night and although I may watch it again, I'll go ahead and post what I think about it today. I have mixed feelings. For every thing about it which seems original or inventive, there's something which seems silly or wrong-headed. For every good camera shot, there is a scene of lousy sound recording. Balancing out the two or three good performances in the flick are weak ones, especially by the three femme fatales. Needless to say, it's an interesting watch, which probably gets better as it goes along, but just doesn't seem to add up to that much in the context of good films, let alone film noir.

This isn't going to be the most-organized post but I want to start by mentioning a few things which haven't been mentioned yet. Everybody talks about this film as somehow reflecting high school life, but the high school, while serving as a low-budget "set" for many of the scenes, is never shown at all to be a "working high school". It's something more akin to a dreamworld school. Aside from the scene in the parking lot, there are rarely any scenes with more than two characters at this school, which is actually San Clemente High School (less than an hour south of me). The scenes with more than two characters seem to involve the "actress" Kara and her lap dogs. At no time do we see a teacher, there are no classrooms shown and there are never any students walking the halls or out of class at all. This certainly helps out when you're making a low-budget flick and it fits with the noir aesthetic of having few characters in individual scenes but it certainly doesn't keep an intelligent viewer from asking why, especially when the "plot" itself is not all that absorbing or even intelligible.

The dialogue has been mentioned and it's true that some of it is directly lifted from the novel The Maltese Falcon and Bogie's film version. These parts include "Now you are dangerous" and "Angel". It was also fun to see Brendan slapping around Dode as if Sam Spade was slapping Joel Cairo. I was a little disappointed though when Brendan did NOT say, "When you're slapped, you'll take it and like it!" Basically the dialogue is supposed to be hard-boiled, but to hear it spoken at times by people who don't even seem to comprehend what they're saying is at times disconcerting. I especially found the three lead female characters very weak in both acting and the dialogue they deliver. On the other hand, the Brain's shorthand dialogue with Brendan is believable in the context of high school friends. Even in the '60s/'70s, I would speak in a slangy way with my best friends which we alone could understand. Now, we didn't do it because we didn't want others to know what we were saying. We basically did it as a way to deepen our friendship and provide each other with little in-jokes to go with the info we were sharing. I'm just not sure how the commingling of traditional hard-boiled dialogue with specific, modern slang plays out here. Once again, I find it to be something of a schizophrenic experience.

Gordon-Leavitt is obviously the backbone of the film and makes it seem better than it probably is. He works fine as both the hero and the dupe which you need in a noir, but since he's modeled after Sam Spade and needs a "fall guy", he is depicted much stronger than say the pathetic Al character in Edgar G. Ulmer's Detour. However, the Tug character, played complexly by Noah Fleiss, certainly grew on me. He could be hotheaded and sane all within a second so that kind of character and acting is necessary for what passes for the murder mystery plot to make sense. He's somewhat reminiscent of the Moose character in Raymond Chandler's Farewell, My Lovely.

I realize that I'm just scratching the surface so far but I have things to do and I'm hurting again so I'll stop for awhile. My rating is so that's probably an average rating for what I give a film noir, even though calling this a film noir is almost (but not quite) like calling Bugsy Malone a gangster flick. They're closer to a pastiche, although Brick obviously wants to be taken seriously since it's got a moody musical score and even includes a David Lynch set (the last photo which winter put in his original post). However, I'm not a committed noir fan. By that I mean I really love movies so I love noir but I don't automatically think more of a film just because it's noir. It still has to fulfill some basic storytelling and technical criteria, and I find Brick borderline in some of those criteria, at least for me. It's interesting to note that director Rian Johnson graduated in 1996 from the same college (USC's School of Cinema-Television) which my daughter Sarah is currently attending. I have no reason to not think well of him, especially since much of this film reminds me of some of the films which Sarah has directed so far, even though she's never seen it. By the way, Sarah's radio show will be starting at 3PM Pacific time (about 45 minutes from now) and you can hear it streaming on kxsc.org at that time.

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Having rewatched Brick, I'll have to correct some of my misstatements in the last post. There are scenes, especially at the beginning, where there are students (very few) in the hall for a second. There is also a scene where students are walking to buses in the front of the school. However, for the most part there is nobody much at the school except for the addition of that rehearsal (?) scene with Kara. I am guessng that most of the few people we see on campus are probably crew members "posing" as students. The sound recording problems I had with the film were mostly involving dialogue but I'll admit that since I watched it on a better system they didn't quite sound as weak as before even though I still believe that several lines of dialogue should be clearer. However, the use of sound effects is quite well-done, especially the sounds we hear of cheerleading practice, unseen lockers slamming shot, piano rehearsals and unintelligible voices signifying a crowd. My fave sound effects are those when Brendan is chased through his school by some knife-wielding punk. Those are clever and bizarre all at once.

Speaking of the beginning, it also seemed as if the plot of the film was propelled by David Lynch's "Twin Peaks" and Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut. The film begins with the finding of a dead blonde high school girl. The girl's name is Emily, but she is one of the three femme fatales, and the primary one is named Laura, as in Laura Palmer, the dead girl in the Lynch opus. The next major scenes in the film seem to involve Brendan learning about a costume party and showing up without a legit invitation, a la the Tom Cruise character in Eyes Wide Shut. Now, the fact that these plot mechanisms are used shouldn't seem strange since Rian Johnson's chief visual influences seem to be Lynch and Kubrick. The interior of the Pin's house is reminiscent of "Twin Peaks" although it also seems to have been lit by Kubrick's lighting cameraman, especially the low-angle interior and exterior scenes. The interior shots remind me of A Clockwork Orange and The Shining while the exterior ones echo some in the cloudy boot camp scenes from Full Metal Jacket. Johnson also utilizes the low-angle shooting in the dialogue scenes which John Huston used in The Maltese Falcon to signify menacing power, especially from Sydney Greenstreet's Casper Gutman. I'm not sure what the scenes in Pin's house between him and Brendan are supposed to signify except for an homage.

I'll mention a few other things which I noticed. I'm going to say that of the three femme fatales that the one best-acted was the Em character. The Laura character is honestly the weak link to me about the movie. In the scene in the Pin's kitchen, we hear zither music, but it's not from The Third Man. Even so, it adds some spice to the noir connection. Overall, the musical score, which I believe to be composed by the director's brother, is complex and varied, using all manner of sounds and instrumentation. The cane which the Pin uses seems to have a duck or goose head on it. [There is what looks like a swan on the wall of Vice Principal Trueman (Richard "Shaft" Roundtree.) Both Joel Cairo (Peter Lorre) and Casper Gutman (Sydney Greenstreet) in The Maltese Falcon have canes, but this cane seems to allude to the one which "crippled" Everett Sloane used in The Lady From Shanghai. Didn't Rita Hayworth call him a cripple before that film's famous climax? There is a scene in Brick where Tug calls Pin a cripple during their "breakup" scene. There are also a few scenes which reminded me of Hitchcock, including one when the fight breaks out at the Pin's house. The powwow is in the basement but the fighting is above them and the camera prowls around the ceiling and we hear disturbing sounds above which sound like the impending doom at the climax of The Birds. There is also a scene where the camera slowly zooms into the tunnel where the body of Em is found which is reminiscent of many Hitch (and Kubrick, for that matter) scenes.

I would have to say that overall I probably think a little more of Brick than I dd the first viewing but not by much. It still seems overlong to me and too many parts of the plot seem to be placed where they go because it's a noir rather than a straight-up mystery. Unless a noir has some tremendous plot twists, like The Maltese Falcon, The Third Man and Chinatown, it usually stands or falls on the strengths of the Dupe/Hero and the Femme Fatale. I think the "detective" is strong here but he can't always carry the femme fatales in this instance. I still think it's worth a watch but compared to the other films I watched this weekend, I find it to be the weakest, least entertaining so I can't really raise my rating above a +.

I watched this again last night. I went in with an open mind because quite a few movies that I really love, I disliked on first viewing. Sorry, but Brick just didn't grow on me much. First thing that has to be addressed; the dialogue. It's the delivery that bothers me. There's no emphasis where there should be and no sharpness to the delivery like there is in classic noir.

To be honest, the whole movie feels just feels flat. Levitt does a good job, but one actor can't carry the whole movie. There is absolutely no chemistry between Laura and Brendan. I really missed the dangerous, sexual chemistry that should have been there. While we are on the subject of Laura, let's just say she should have been cast as the dead girl and leave it at that.

The Pin looked eccentric and had some funny lines, but again, flat. Haas could have had more fun with that role and made it more interesting.

The scenes between Brandon and Brain were good and had the energy I thought the rest of the film lacked, but I think that was the only time I was truly engaged. The rest I felt was so-so unless Laura was on-screen then it went to bad.

This is my friends favorite movie and he loves it so ill have to give it a chance

Hi, just recently watched insiduous. What a surprisingly scary film that is, i really enjoyed it. Im lookin forward to grave encounters to come out

Thanks for sharing your thoughts on Brick.

I wish your posts had Walken-audio

It's been a month of silence here. Nobody has anything to add? We are thinking of starting another club, but it almost seems like it's not worth it if so few participate.

This also needs more discussion, as well as this and this. Those are The Cameraman, as well as Metropolis and The Fall.

Yeah I'd be interested in this re-starting as well.

I recently watched this film and I was pleasantly surprised with the result. The two halves (film noir and the high school setting) are completely polar but in some strange way they fit together perfectly. The quirky characters and the gangster slang made for an interesting viewing experience completely different to almost everything else out there.

Did you find the editing to be an homage or something you've never seen before in terms of how it was paced?

Still can't think of too much more to say: it's a lot more fun to watch the second time, in a way, because you know the dialogue is dense and you're ready for it, and you spend less time just translating it like you have to the first time.

I'll concede that it occasionally veers off into self-parody and certain turns of phrase are hopelessly dense, though not to the point at which you can't figure out how it's supposed to work. But I think these instances are few at most, and when it works it works tremendously well. It helps that everyone involved sells it completely.

I definitely have to be in a certain kind of mood to want to watch Brick, but sometimes I am definitely in that kind of mood.

Do you think it borrows too heavily from the past or does it "progress" the genre in any way? Is it a revival of sorts?

Rather than being a complete homage to any one film of the classic film noir era the film seemed to be paced in the same way as a number of films (e.g the suspense built in Hitchcock films comes to mind), while simultaneously using modern editing techniques (i.e the fast inter-cutting of two frames, providing a 'flicker' effect) used in more contemporary film, thus once again providing for a sense of comparison between the new and the old film greats.

I thought that, rather than bringing anything new to the genre it brought it into a more modern setting, however I don't believe it was a revival either. I believe that 'Brick' is more like a path way which can be taken both forwards and backwards; that is it could bring new fans to the traditional film noir genre yet also point them in the direction of newer neo-noir films.

I agree. It's a proper stepping stone, but unlike most, it's still enjoyable when returning to it.

Man this thread is dying

I noticed Mark noted (probably accurately, I can check up on it) many influences in certain shots. I know for a fact Maltese Falcon was ripped off in a couple scenes, but I think a lot of us agree influences were dealt with in a tasteful manner. However, what could have been changed or added to make the film better? Less self-parody? A somehow darker twist? I know there were a number of people who didn't like it so what should be different?

Hell, I'll take serious or silly answers

Ok, I haven't visited this thread in a long time, even though I promised I would. So here I am to redeem myself somewhat.

1. Thracian Dawg had a problem with Brick not being plausible or realistic enough. I don't think this film tried to be realistic. It's highly stylized and just because it isn't plausible at all, doesn't mean it's automatically diminished in quality. It's kinda like a musical. In real life, people don't just burst out singing and dancing in the middle of the street or whatever. But I don't hear people criticizing them for their lack of realism.

2. I re-watched this last weekend with my girlfriend. She didn't like it at all. We ended up turning it off because she couldn't get into it, partially because the specific vocabularium used and partially because she wasn't engaged by the story. And Mark, she too thought the femme fatales' acting was sub-par. I have to admit that after she remarked that fairly early on, I started paying attention to it and while I don't think they are terrible, they aren't looking too good either...

I'm happy to respond to these.

1. I usually don't attack a film for being unrealistic. Just look at my Fave Films and you will see many which seem unbelievable, but in the context of cinema, they are wonderful things which film can do quite well. As far as musicals go, I believe that is probably the least fave genre of MoFos in general, although maybe I'm only referring to "Boys/Men". Maybe some people don't criticize them so much because they (wrongfully) completely ignore them.

2. I'm happy whenever someone agrees with me about anything. I tend to lay my heart and soul on the line so that the few people who care can see what I see. However, I do want to clarify that although I believe that Brick has way too many femme fatales, that I've decided that the Laura Palmer-type character is the best-acted, the girl who seems to live at the high school auditorium is just weird and unfocused, and the primary femme fatale, the one who's in the most important scenes, just seems incapable of even basic communication with another actor and much worse, the audience. I realize that this actress has made a living, especially in TV, but I haven't seen her in anything else so I can only hope that she has improved considerably since she was in this movie.